This invention relates to telecommunications networks, and more particularly to providing telecommunication features and services in such networks.
As new features such as call forwarding, call waiting, or three-way calling have been added to telecommunication systems, it has become increasingly difficult to manage the behavioral complexity of the features and their interactions. In particular, in some instances, the widely varied features offered by today's telecommunication providers conflict and produce unintended results. This is frequently referred to as the feature-interaction problem. This problem arises primarily from the incremental, feature-by-feature extension of telecommunications system functionality. Specifically, when adding new features, a comprehensive analysis of potential interactions with other features, followed by a redesign of old features to integrate smoothly with the new features, is typically not practical. Thus, as more and more new features are added to these systems, the resulting complexity of system operations in providing features, and the interaction of various features with each other, can potentially damage the quality of the telecommunication network services.
Prior attempts have been made to reduce the problems resulting from such feature interactions. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,160,883, issued Nov. 23, 2004 and entitled “Telecommunication System and Method,” which is incorporated by reference herein, discloses a network architecture, referred to as a distributed feature composition (DFC) network, for managing the feature-interaction problem. Additionally, pending utility applications, “Routing Extensions For Telecommunications Network System And Method,” Ser. No. 09/644,128, filed Aug. 23, 2000; U.S. Pat. No. 6,822,942, issued Nov. 23, 2004 and entitled “Protocol Extensions For Telecommunications Network Systems and Method;” and, U.S. Pat. No. 6,778,560, issued Aug. 17, 2004 and entitled “Signaling/Media Separation for Telecommunication Network System and Method,” which are incorporated by reference herein, disclosed an enhanced and modified DFC to further address feature interaction problems.
As is well known, requests for telecommunication features in DFC and other telecommunication systems, for example originating from a telephone in a PSTN network, typically comprise messages having at least two addresses, a source address and a target address. The source address typically corresponds with the originator of the request, while the target address corresponds with the destination party of the request. As is also well known, as a call is transmitted from the originator to the destination and features are applied to the call, address translation is commonly required by many of the features. Such address translation typically consists of, for example, modifying the communication by changing the source address, target address or both addresses for various purposes. Due to its widespread use, address translation results in a high number of feature interactions in today's telecommunication networks. Accordingly, many of the feature-interaction problems that occur in telecommunication networks may be traced directly to issues created as a result of such address translation.